Copyrights

The license the BrahmaKumaris.Info website uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, BrahmaKumaris.Info content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others, and acknowledges the authors of the BrahmaKumaris.Info article used. A direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement. BrahmaKumaris.info articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.

To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in BrahmaKumaris.info is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at GNU Free Documentation License.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

• Content on BrahmaKumaris.Info encyclopedia is " work in progress " and covered by usual " standard disclaimers ". It is a collaborative and working document in the public domain and does not constitute final material.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

• BrahmaKumaris.Info has no connection with the Brahma Kumaris World University or any of its satellite organisations whatsoever nor does it represent the BKWSU or its views.
• BrahmaKumaris.Info has been given specific rights from Shiva Baba via Veerendra Dev Dixit to reproduce original BK teaching aids, Murlis and Godly literature.

Users' rights and obligations

If you want to use BrahmaKumaris.Info materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the BrahmaKumaris.Info article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:

• your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
• you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
• you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a BrahmaKumaris.Info article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the BrahmaKumaris.Info article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that BrahmaKumaris.Info makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.

Example notice

An example notice, for an article that uses the BrahmaKumaris.Info article might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from http://www.brahmakumaris.info/

Fair use materials and special requirements

All original BrahmaKumaris.Info text is distributed under the GFDL. Occasionally, BrahmaKumaris.Info articles may include images, sounds, or text quotes used under international Copyright Law" fair use " doctrine. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most license such as the GFDL or public domain practical. In cases where no such images/sounds are currently available, then fair use images are acceptable until such time as free images become available.

In BrahmaKumaris.Info, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate. This also leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of BrahmaKumaris.Info, of such "fair use" content retrieved from BrahmaKumaris.Info: this "fair use" content does not fall under the GFDL license as such, but under the "fair use" or similar/different regulations in the country where the media are retrieved.

BrahmaKumaris.Info does use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original BrahmaKumaris.Info text such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts. When wanting to contribute such texts that include Invariant Sections or Cover Texts to BrahmaKumaris.Info, see "introducing invariant sections or cover texts in Wikipedia below.

Image guidelines

Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone owns them unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow a photograph to be used.

Tagging

Image description pages can be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images. It is currently unclear what should happen in cases where the same image has been uploaded more than once with different respective copyright statements.

Photographs

This is based on the image guidelines at IMDB, so it especially applies to photographs but also can apply to other pictures. Legitimate photographs generally come from three different places with permission.

1. Studios, producers, magazine publishers or media outlet that originally shot the photograph.
2. Agencies that represent the photographers who shot the photos or the photographer themself the latter especially for amateur photographs.
3. Submissions from the individual himself or herself or a legal representative of the individual.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to BrahmaKumaris.Info, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts. In order to contribute, you therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

• you own the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
• you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever.

In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.

Introducing invariant sections or cover texts on BrahmaKumaris.Info

Under BrahmaKumaris.Info's current copyright conditions, and with the current facilities of the MediaWiki software, it is only possible to include in BrahmaKumaris.Info external GFDL materials that contain invariant sections or cover texts, if all of the following apply ;

1. You are the copyright holder of these external GFDL materials (or: you have the explicit, i.e. written, permission of the copyright holder to do what follows);
2. The length and nature of these invariant sections and cover texts does not exceed what can be placed in an BrahmaKumaris.Info summary;
3. You are satisfied that these invariant sections and cover texts are not listed elsewhere than in the "page history" of the page where these external materials are placed;
4. You are satisfied that further copies of BrahmaKumaris.Info content are distributed under the standard GFDL application of "with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts" (in other words, for the copies derived from wikipedia, you agree that these parts of the text contributed by you will no longer be considered as "invariant sections" or "cover texts" in the GFDL sense);
5. The original invariant sections and/or cover texts are contained in the edit summary of the edit with which you introduce the thus GFDLed materials in BrahmaKumaris.Info so, that if "permanent deletion" would be applied to that edit, both the thus GFDLed material and its invariant sections and cover texts are jointly deleted.

Seen the stringent conditions above, it is very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections (or with cover texts) by original content without invariant sections or cover texts whenever possible.

Using copyrighted work from others

If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact along with names and dates. It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of BrahmaKumaris.Info's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to BrahmaKumaris.Info. However, it would still be unethical but not illegal to do so without citing the original as a reference. A certain amount of reformulation is necessary in a general context.

Linking to copyrighted works

Linking to copyrighted works is usually not a problem, as long as you have made a reasonable effort to determine that the page in question is not violating someone else's copyright. If it is, please do not link to the page. Whether such a link is contributory infringement is currently being debated in the courts, but in any case, linking to a site that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on us. If the site in question is making fair use of the material, linking is OK.

If you find a copyright infringement

It is not the job of BrahmaKumaris.Info contributor to police content for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue on that page's talk page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe may be the source of the text.

Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that does not affect their right to post it here under the GFDL. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from BrahmaKumaris.Info. In both of these cases, it is a good idea to make a note in the talk page to discourage such false alarms in the future. If all of the content of a page is a suspected copyright infringement, then the page should be brought to the attention of the site admins. In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.

If you are the owner of hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on BrahmaKumaris.Info without your permission and against fair use, then you may request the page be immediately removed but it may take up to 28 days for the page to be deleted. Please provide evidence to support your claim of ownership.